Crusade of the Revolutionaries
A Personal Narrative Essay written by Kiane Artis ©
Written on November.28th, 2020
Are we brave enough to be who we are, is one of the biggest questions that we can ask of ourselves. It leaves us wondering, do we ever just get tired of trying at a failed attempt to be accepted and just bravely take a dive into the unknown to see if we can live out our lives as who we truly are? Do some of us dare to find out?-to walk to the beat of our own drum, to set our own distinctive identity aside from the crowd mentality-or do we choose to conform to the ideals and the expectations that are set for us to live by?
I, for one, am so tired of trying to walk by a beat that was never meant for me to walk.
I am so tired of seeking approval and acceptance by an imperfect crowd of people who are just like me: flawed, just as bruised as I am, even though I may not see their scars, and most of all, human.
There will always be boxes that society tries to place us in and names that society wants to brand us as, based on our color, our gender, etc. But I am one of the many who openly defies the world’s viewpoint. I’ve never wanted to live by conformity. I wanted a life that would’ve been ground-breaking. It’ll never be perfect. It doesn’t have to be, but be a life that will teach me the errors of my mistakes, to help me further grow as a person, to be a life worth living, being able to be completely utterly free. That is all I ever truly wanted to be. But I know that it seems like a dream; working seven days out the week, eight hours out of a day-this isn’t the “living” that I would like to do. I understand the early punk movement’s anger against society’s customs. I too, think revolutionary, and would like for my dream that I have set afire in me to someday be an actual reality; never to fit into boxes, labels and nametags, receiving judgement and critique again. I just want to be me.
I won’t ever fit neatly into a perfect mold, something expected for me to be. That has been the hardest thing to accept in myself. I wanted to be perfect. So badly I did, that when I made mistakes, I beat myself down ten times more than I should.
I’ve cried that I’m not perfect, and I couldn’t understand how a loving God could love something so broken and angry and sad and depressed like me. What did he see in me that I didn’t see before? He saw me as his child, someone that does have life and value, and I wanted to love myself so strongly in the way that he did, though in my human state, it’ll never be as perfect as his.
I almost mastered self-hatred. I hated my body, though I had little reason to, since I was overall healthy, but I didn’t count that as a blessing enough, over my prized ideal of how I should look, than how I should be. Beauty became an unhealthy idol for me. I dangerously played a game with my health, starving myself, all for the sacrifice of my idolized self. I hated myself, but I wasn’t honest enough, wasn’t candid enough, about my problems, just my mistakes.
I hated my voice, how squeaky it sounded, like a high-pitch sound I’d ascribe to a mouse.
I hated that I liked TV shows that centered around the supernatural, certain anime, cartoons, because I thought, while my peers were trying to fast-forward their aging process, acting more older than they should, I was enjoying adolescence, and what if they didn’t agree with me with my supposed childish antics?
I hated that I liked things that were outside the supposed norm of what black people can like or not like. You see, I liked rock music, I liked heavy metal and punk rock and jammed out to darkwave and cold wave, and the post-punk music of the era when Goth began, but I feared, thinking, what if my peers don’t see me as similar to them? What if they think that I’m weird? That word I so hate and despise and loathe and fear to ever, ever be called and labelled as such. I wanted the label as being cool, being unique and different, but in a way that everybody liked, but I’d just be another carbon copy of the same group of people that I hung around. I’d like what they like, I’d listen to music that they listened to, and I just wouldn’t be myself. I’d be a puppet dancing and twirling and overall pretending, following their every move, on strings.
I never knocked what they liked. I liked some rap music along with pop and techno, and I loved classical music, but I’m allowed to like various things. There’s no one way to be. I just wished that some people would’ve accepted that about me.
But I now know, from being a little older, a little wiser from God’s help and guidance that I needed to start loving who I was, truly, honestly, and completely as strongly as I could. He loved me when I sometimes didn’t love myself enough, when I was too busy trying to appease my family, my friends, my peers, even though there was no need to try. I just felt like I was under a spotlight all the time. That if I screwed up, I was bad. But if I did well, I’d be rewarded tremendously.
But I didn’t need to try appeasing them; I should’ve just been me all along. I know they would’ve accepted me, because I know that they truly love me, and so many people seek that, that kind of love that embraces you like a warm, that kind of love that enflames you like a bright flaring fire, that kind of love that eases you and heals you from all your traumas and your pain. I needed that, that kind of love, after being raped twice by a student from my former high school, after being sexually assaulted by another student from the same school, after leaving high school to go through homeschooling and later seeking out another school to attend to.
I needed it, so badly.
But I had a God that loved me for me, and that’s the first and the only person that truly matters to me. If the world had not loved me, or embraced me, or accepted me, I knew that I could find that with him.
I dare to be a broken mold. I dare to be an imperfect flawed beauty, a person with many scars from the traumas that I have endured in my life. I dare to occupy a standing in the crowd. Yes, I am quirky, I am eccentric, I am bold, I am passionate, and I choose to be kind towards the people that have wronged me rather than fully hating them. I choose to fight the impulse to be worse than good, because that is not who I am, or who I want to be. That is me, unapologetically-with a period.
I write from my pain. I write from my truth. There’s no other place in me that I write from more than those places. It’s where all of my tears spill and anger fills and frustrations are vented. It is me in all my humanity. I write not for the sake of perfection. I write because it is freeing. It is emotional, it is a method of being boundless, and it describes the soul-my soul-so vividly.
So, about my identity, here’s a list of three things that’s been bothering me the most about my Christian Goth identity.
1. That to be Goth is to be Satanic
2. That to be Goth, one must be white
3. That to be Goth, one must never care what others think about you
I am not a Satanist. I’ll never be. To be a Satanist means that you choose to follow your own path aside from God, limiting morals to your own conjecture, to your own approved notions of what good and evil is. It is like navigating an area without a compass, when you choose not to walk with God. I will never walk without my compass, without my God, my Savior Jesus Christ/Yeshua, who upholds me and has lifted me ever since I was born.
No, you do not have to be white. This shouldn’t be a shocker to anyone. A subculture is opened for anyone to join. I do not need to be told that I’m too white sounding from my black peers, or told from within the subculture, that I have no place to fit into, because I do not fit an aesthetic of pale skin that I clearly do not have. My shade is just as beautiful, just as acceptable as any other, because God made all colors that are a part of humanity beautiful.
And lastly, I’ll still think, in the back of mind, of the stares, of the doubts, of the fears that I have in being myself. That is just human. But I’m still a Goth, nothing that any person, anyone who judges me, can do to change that. As my friend had said once to me, as we walked through a mall on Tuesday morning with my mother, as I received some stares from people standing in line waiting to enter a store, “Don’t worry about the stares. They’re just jealous of your style as a Goth.” And I smiled a little more from his words. It gave me the confidence to just be myself, boldly and shamelessly, myself. The importance of my identity is found in Christ. That is who I truly am. Me being me, being Goth, is my expression and shown upon my choice of appearance. It is not a sin.
When Goth and I first met, I was in awe of the beauty that I found within it. From Bauhaus’s first single “Bela Lugosi’s dead” followed later by their next single, “Dark Entries”, to Siouxsie and the Banshee’s “Spellbound” and “Nightshift”, and The Damned’s “Shadow of love”, London after Midnight’s song “Sacrifice”, a song about dying for someone that you love, with its gothic romantic undertones, and Switchblade Symphony’s “Gutter glitter”, along with Christian Goth bands such as Saviour Machine with their song “Carnival of souls” and “The eyes of the storm”, Wedding Party’s “Bury the dead”, Allos with their gothic metal song “Everlasting love” and “Christian America” by Dead Artist Syndrome, this music that I love helped in shaping my Goth identity and self-expression based off of what the music had expressed to me, along with the gothic novels I read, iconic Goth characters and movies, most favorably, my favorite gothic icon Wednesday Addams. I fell in love with Gothic rock, the music that started it all, originating from punk, the movement that counteracted society’s norms and ways and actually questioned it. Something some of us don’t do so often because we’re so used to conforming.
My thinking that I saw as outside of the box, I found like-minded people, such as myself, within the alternative community, and I felt home, like I was finally understood by someone who knew how I felt and could relate to the same thinking, that you don’t have to dress the way society says is cool, find beauty in what society deems as beautiful, or ascribe to mainstream pop culture as the rite of passage of coolness, topics, and things you should like. There are other options.
What I loved most, aside from the Goth music that began the culture, was Gothic art. It’s artistic expression through literature and art and architecture.
It ignited something that was so passionate inside of me. I always felt this longing to identify outside of the mainstream culture, since I could not see myself identifying with it overall, though I liked some things from it.
But when I discovered Goth and the Gothic artistry, and things that were darkly-inclined that had a lovely aspect to it, I felt that I was walking through a dream world. I felt that I was a part of something that held many of the things that I found interestingly beautiful.
When I was first coming into my Goth identity, I had already known about Gothic artistry, just not as much about the music. I felt clueless, until researching. I didn’t want to self-identify as Goth fully, without knowing what it truly was, and not wanting to make the mistake of disrespecting a culture with false ideas of what Goth is. I wanted to be a part of it while respecting and studying its history. I was a baby bat who wanted to grow her wings. I didn’t want to be seen as a poser, or worse, a fool who didn’t know what she was talking about.
I’m nowhere near an expert, but I do know somethings about the subculture and its music.
I believe the Goth subculture’s core and start was with the music that launched it deriving from punk music and becoming post-punk, gaining many people who loved the music and what it expressed to them on a deeper note. The music is like the heart of the culture while I believe the Gothic artistry such as its literature from Victorian-era England, with works like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, the pamphlets of Penny dreadfuls that were being sold to the public on the streets of London, such as well-known Penny Dreadful “Varney the Vampire” (Penny dreadfuls were short stories written in Victorian-era London meant to incite fear and horror into its readers), it’s fashion and celebrated works of Gothic art from within the 12th Century AD during the medieval era of Western Europe, by artists such as Giotto, Donatello, Duccio and more, along with the 12th Century Gothic architecture, is the expression artistically of the subculture.
To me, I think, though Goth is a music based subculture, with many different subgenres such as Post-Punk, Gothic rock, Darkwave, and Cold Wave, to name a few, I think in the broader diverse sense, that Gothdom incorporates a romantic love and admiration for things beautiful in the more darker aspects of life, that is both musically expressed, from the post-punk era of the 80’s beginning the start of Goth music and it’s subgenres, to being expressed through literature, to the choice of style a Goth person chooses to express their selves in, and for a love for the creative arts, architecture, films and shows, with the expressions of the gothic. Taking away one of those things limits, in my opinion, what Goth as a whole is and can be.
A culture has music, fashion and design and decorum. That is what broadens and diversifies one culture from another is its sets of customs. Without Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Bauhaus wouldn’t have created Bela Lugosi’s dead, since the role that truly pioneered horror film star Bela Lugosi’s career was the role of Dracula, and the song’s lyrics centers around that titular character that he played.
Goth to me is to question what can be considered lovely and to challenge it. That a sunny day is beautiful, but so can a cloudy rainy day be too. It’s all within a person’s perception. It’s finding loveliness and appreciating it from the often abandoned and overlooked areas of life.
But as I think upon these thoughts of mine, the biggest thing for me that I have learned from is to how to be myself and do it well. That’s been the whole central point of my teenage era, and still prominent in my adulthood. It’s in how to practice the art of not caring what others think and say.
Society will look at the Goth person and assume the worst and ascribe all kinds of falsities.
Society will look upon your skin color and associate all sorts of limitations, views and stereotypes about you.
Society doesn’t believe in a fair game. Either you “fit in” and be happy, going through the false positivity message of getting back up and try again, fake it till you make it, do whatever makes you happy, keep smiling, never cry or express your pain that’s eating away inside you-society is not well, so how can it make you well? Only healer that we have is God, and he says to cast all our sins and lay it before the cross. You get back up, yes, but allow yourself time to rest, to reflect, for introspection. Maybe the falling down part was meant to happen, so you’d learn from it, figure out what needs to be fixed in your life, and then get back up, with full power, once you’ve recovered and learned, and keep continuing to grow afterwards from the fall. Don’t fake your smiles; they won’t make you happy, only miserable. Smile for all things to be grateful for, which is everything. You should find reasons to smile, which is counting your blessings.
And don’t bottle the pain that is inside you. Let it out like a loud roar, but in a healthy way. Let it out musically, through your art, by venting, whatever healthy form that you have to choose but let it out! Don’t hold yourself back. See, these are the words I should’ve abided in myself a long time ago, but had barely done so. My anger was a tempest rushing to the shores, fiercely raging without stopping-a wildfire that couldn’t be quenched. But I was young, with so many problems growing up that I later addressed, which, the biggest one of all, was the acceptance that I needed to find within myself. I spent all this youthful energy of mine trying to fit in with the in-crowd that I was so deeply tired and exhausted from it all that I just couldn’t anymore. I’d ask my mom, as I remember, in my middle school days, for a pair of Adidas sneakers, then next to Michael Jordan’s, then Ugh boots. I wanted to fit in the scene of my peers that were dressing cool, or as I now know, their version of cool. It wasn’t my own, but I desperately tried to make it my own.
Sure, I can rock a pair of Ugh boots, or my old sneakers, if I still had them and they weren’t thrown away during spring cleaning, but is it my style? No, not really. I’d like to wear my black boots, and sometimes, on the days I just want completely comfortable shoes and not make my feet suffer, I’d go for my black or red shoes with whatever attire that I have on for the day. But the important thing is it’s my attire. I have set my own revolutionary, away from the oppression of peers, judgmental people and even myself, from my self-deprecating conscience that’s filled my head with doubts for years. No, this is my revolutionary, and anyone can join the crusade with us outcasts, and weirdos and freaks, but the question that I’ll ask is: do you want to join the crusade?
